WE WERE LOOKING down the events calendar and noticed the MG Show & Spares Day was coming up. A regular event at Stoneleigh, it seemed like a good chance to catch up with what was going on with the MG owners out there, and also to have a scrounge around the many trade stands. We didn’t really expect the show to stir up the old, partially dormant, grey matter quite so much.

   We don’t make much of a secret of our obsessive tendencies when it comes to British cars, especially those with any association with the once mighty BL empire. So that’s when the bells started to clang. How come we don’t obsess about MGs? Was the image of the flat cap and string backed gloves so deeply engrained, that we’re almost hard wired to accept that these aren’t ‘our kind of cars’?

   Right, the plan was to go and look. Without prejudice. Stoneleigh’s good for plenty of reasons. It’s easy to drive to regardless of which part of the country you’re travelling from. It’s a smart venue with decent catering these days, so you don’t lose your focus when bargain hunting for lack of a cup of tea and a sarnie. And it’s a fair old size, so when the show organisers are on the ball - in this case V&CE, who organise plenty of cracking shows - there’s loads to see.

   The signs were all good. The car parking areas were all packed, and not just with endless moderns. It seemed plenty of owners had dragged their MGs out of the garage for the trip, despite the gloomy February weather. And where there’s cars, there’s people. The show was packed.

   There are two conclusions we managed to draw from the show. First off, late MGs are seriously undervalued. Any other 2+2 coupé with bags of tuning potential and a ton of heritage now demands serious cash, so how come we saw at least half a dozen very tidy MGB GTs well under the two grand mark? And if you wanted inspiration, you only had to walk as far as the Frontline stand and take a shufty at Ed’s gorgeous gunmetal grey example. Ladies and gents, form an orderly queue and grab one while you can, because one day very soon, the retro world is going to wake up to these cars in a big way.

   Secondly, where have all the young classic MG drivers gone? We hope you’re still out there, but most of the guys under thirty at the show that we encountered were either owners of the very last MG Rover products, or appeared to have been forced along to the show under duress by an older relative.

   The MG has always offered so much for the younger driver, and with prices as they are at the moment, that potential is huge. Check out any model from the mid-40s on, apply the usual retro thought processes and you could have a hell of a car on your hands. We saw a couple of very nicely modified Midgets, but that was about the extent of it. We’re not getting all grey-ist here - we’re too close to the top of the hill to start getting judgemental and the truth is owning modified old cars has nothing to do with age, it’s a state of mind - but we reckon that the MG scene needs a rapid injection of fresh blood, if only to redress the balance with the strictly resto crowd.

   Despite our serious, ponderous state of mind, we still managed to have a good root around the trade and auto jumble and, thanks to the wonder of parts-bin engineering, grabbed some excellent bargains to help the 'Dep-O' projects get closer to completion. We can only be thankful that the spending budget for the day was carefully capped, or that very tasty white, chrome bumper B GT would have been in the shed by now…